Warcraft Retrospective 31: Paved With Good Intentions

Before we proceed to the second half of the Terror of the Tides campaign, I should mention that Illidan gives me heavy Fëanor vibes.

One of the most skilled elves ever, whose pride and arrogance led to his downfall; thinking he alone could save the world, even if it’s to be accomplished through mass murder, betrayal, and by defying the will of everyone else, even the gods, because clearly they don’t have what it takes and don’t know what they’re doing. In fact, to hell with them and their “help”; they’d only be a burden. In fact, let’s not share one’s plans with anyone else and burn the ships to ensure nobody can follow.

And of course, both Fëanor and Illidan have massive fandoms insisting they have done nothing wrong.

Balancing the Scales

Okay, so first things first: the writer of this campaign clearly had no sense of logistics.

Somehow, the runner reached the night elf leaders, they mustered their forces, boarded the ships¹ and sailed back from Kalimdor all the way to the Broken Isles within the span of a single day. Ridiculous as it is, what’s even weirder is that Illidan has spent all this time assaulting Maiev’s base instead of implementing whatever plan he needed the Eye of Sargeras for. I guess he’s not acting entirely rationally and has a beef against her in particular.

Whatever. Tyrande and Malfurion make landfall, though some of the ships have gone astray and landed on surrounding islands. There’s a wall of trees separating them from their destination, but Malfurion isn’t deterred.

He animates some of the trees as treants, creating a passage.

As a teenager I loved this scene, as it painted Malfurion as using his powers pragmatically. Now I find it dangerously close to treating gameplay mechanics as literally true. Forests aren’t actually impassable walls, nor does it make sense that animating four trees would be enough to create a passage through a forest. If anything, it’s rather wasteful, unnecessarily upsetting the environment.

Still, I have a different sort of appreciation for this scene. It serves as a diegetic reminder of a gameplay mechanic that will be very useful to the player in this mission. The player might have played the original night elf campaign long ago and forgotten Malfurion’s abilities, and this scene gently reminds them without interrupting the story flow.

One of the gimmicks of the TFT campaigns is forcing the player to manage multiple forces in parallel. We saw it in the previous mission, when we had to juggle the limited forces escorting the runner alongside base defense. This mission continues the trend.

Tyrande and Malfurion have a limited army, though they receive reinforcements from ships they find along the way. They’re both level 10 and start with all their abilities, but without any of the items acquired in the previous campaign. A shame. I really could use that Necklace of Spell Immunity.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the map, Maiev has a moderately developed base, but no gold mine. She has to rely on whatever gold Tyrande and Malfurion can find to build reinforcements. The good news is that since there’s no workers mining gold, upkeep isn’t an issue.

Eventually, Tyrande and Malfurion come across a naga base blocking the way to Maiev’s base. It’s worth attacking it from two sides, with Maiev and her defense force joining the assault from the east.

Once this base is down, I move my main tree to the gold mine– no wait, there’s a cutscene to sit through first. Maiev’s reaction to Tyrande is… less than cordial.

Maiev is pleased to see Malfurion, but Tyrande, much less so, reminding her of all the deaths she caused to free Illidan. It’s never addressed why Maiev herself wasn’t guarding Illidan’s prison when Tyrande rampaged through it. (The Doylist reason is that she wasn’t invented yet, of course.)

So yes. Now I move my trees to the former location of the naga base. The amount of gold in this mine is easily enough to last for the remainder of the mission.

Now it’s time to take the fight to Illidan. First I make a detour, collecting one of the reinforcements. It contains a new unit introduced in the expansion: mountain giants.

These guys are absolute powerhouses. Just like their model would suggest, they’re sturdy and tanky, with 1600 HP. They have a Taunt ability to force enemies to attack them, making them even better tanks, and they can break a tree to make a war club, giving them siege damage and thus making them excellent for attacking buildings. They make base sieges, traditionally costly for night elves, a breeze.

And yes, ironically, they give the most nature-themed faction in the game yet another way to destroy trees.

We besiege Illidan’s base.

He actually has two bases. Between three heroes and a ton of units, the northern base, containing Illidan himself, goes down easily, but the southern base proves a tougher nut to crack, as I got complacent and stopped building reinforcements. Eventually, thanks to Maiev’s Vengeance providing reinforcements for free, I whittle down that base too.

Illidan continues his patented modus operandi of making vague threats without explaining what he’s up to.

Malfurion and Maiev come to Tyrande’s rescue. Malfurion says he should have returned Illidan to his cage instead of banishing him. Illidan declares that he now serves a new master and has a task to perform in his service, without revealing who the master is or what the task is.

He then runs away, or, rather, sails away. Again.

Shards of the Alliance

The night elves follow Illidan to a blight-stricken Lordaeron, which by itself is notable enough, as this is the first time we see them appear in the eastern continent, whose residents don’t even know they exist. Malfurion departs the company for now to commune with the grievously disfigured land. Though he’s gone for this mission, his items do not appear on the ground, so it’s a fair bet that we’ll be controlling him again later.

The first people Tyrande and Maiev run into are…

…also elves. They’re refugees, led by Prince Kael’thas, or Kael for short. He’s an interesting character in his own right, and I’ll talk about him at length when we reach his campaign. (Spoiler: his campaign is the next one.) What’s relevant right now is that he knows what night elves are (which makes sense, as they’re his ancestors, and he’d be well-educated in ancient elven history), knows their traditional greeting, and welcomes their help. Turns out something has stirred up the undead in Dalaran, and now they’ve been hounding Kael’s people day and night, so they’re going to seek refuge on the other side of the river Arevass.

From the very start, something’s not right with the geography here. Kael says that the undead are based in Dalaran, so it would make sense for him to get away from it — yet, as we’ll see in this mission and the next one, we’ll actually be marching towards Dalaran, in other words, towards the source of the disturbance.

Tyrande, on her part, is willing to offer Kael help in exchange for helping the night elves hunt the demon they seek, though Maiev believes they have no time for this.

Kael is moving with a caravan consisting of some kind of… magical hovercraft supply wagons, and the goal here is to protect them and save at least two of the four. Yes, this mission is very similar to “The Long March” in the orc campaign, and “Protect the caravan at all costs!” (and, thankfully, variations on this line) is going to be the new “Hold your formations! The kodos must be protected!” as the undead spawn to attack the caravan again. And again. And again.

What’s even worse is how a computer-controlled Kael uses his abilities. He’s a blood mage, the fourth Alliance hero introduced in the expansion, and his signature spell, Flame Strike, is an AoE damage over time conflagration that he will cast over and over — and is perfectly happy to cast it on his own troops if it means getting that one ghoul who’d soon be gone anyway. I had to watch out for it and heal his swordsmen and priests with Rejuvenation.

While our starting force is relatively paltry (just two mountain giants and two druids of the claw), there are three mercenary camps along the way. An additional wrinkle, however, is that to get gold to hire those mercenaries, you have to dig up Kael’s supply caches scattered across the map, but it just so happens that the undead have built small outposts right over their locations.

At the first stop along the way, Kael reveals that his people, once known as high elves, have renamed themselves blood elves after the Scourge invasion that left Quel’Thalas broken. And… I’m sorry, but that’s not how ethnic identities work.

In real life, ethnicities generally don’t rename themselves after one invasion of their homeland.^{[citation needed]} This renaming even affected multiplayer, where high elf sorceresses and priests became blood elves, too. Given all the other renames in TFT, even those of generic units like ballistas and catapults, I wonder if it was done to make the term trademarkable, as that seemed to be the period when Blizzard was establishing its own Warcraft trademarks while avoiding those of its possible competitors (hence the renaming of Furion and Grom). “High elf” is a generic fantasy term, but “blood elf” would be potentially trademarkable.

Eventually, we come across a fork in the road.

One route is shorter, but passes through an undead base. The other is longer (and has better loot in blinkable secret areas), but has less formidable defenses along the way. Personally I’ve never taken the long route in any of my playthroughs.

Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning that one of the mercenary units available in this mission is the rogue wizard², who is simply a wizard not under the jurisdiction of the Kirin Tor, and therefore outlawed in Alliance lands.

The mission ends with us holding the line in front of the last bridge, in Pyrewood Village just before River Arevass.³ Despite Tyrande saying “Their numbers are limitless”, the undead waves here are actually easily defeated. Finally it’s time to cross the bridge itself. Tyrande stays behind to buy Maiev and Kael some time…

Unlike Sylvanas, Tyrande has all the common sense of Inspector Gadget, and so instead of standing safely on the ground and collapsing the bridge, she decides to stand on the bridge as undead advance. This ends predictably:

The bridge collapses, flushing Tyrande downriver. Kael proposes rushing to her aid, but Maiev stops him. Tyrande was a soldier, she says, and knew what she was doing; they have a mission to accomplish, and time grows short.

The narration keeps Maiev’s motives ambiguous here, but I think it’s fair to say that she was likely driven by petty revenge here, not just pragmatic focus on the mission. We have indeed seen Maiev treating all secondary concerns as irrelevant to the mission, not unlike Arthas, but now she has the perfect chance of removing Tyrande from the picture — perhaps even getting her killed by inaction — while keeping her own hands clean.

Maiev wasn’t the most altruistic person to begin with, and now even the mask of the focused professional is beginning to slip.

Malfurion’s Vision

Meanwhile, in the depths of Silverpine Forest, Malfurion is conducting a ritual to commune with the land.

Suddenly, earthquakes shake the land, causing Malfurion excruciating pain. He summons ancient spirits of the forest (which look like wisps), and they show him what is going on:

The earthquakes are threatening to split Northrend apart. And what’s causing them?

It’s Illidan, performing a ritual through the Eye of Sargeras. Again he’s referencing some kind of “master”.

Malfurion promises that he won’t let this go unpunished. He departs the glade. Where he walked, the blight has cleared, and stags come in to roam on the sunlit grass.

The Ruins of Dalaran

Malfurion comes to the night elf base camp, but finds only Maiev. What happened to Tyrande? Well, in Maiev’s own words…

This is big. She outright lies to the lover of her missing comrade in arms. She’s hunting one called the Betrayer, but who’s the real betrayer now? She who fights monsters, indeed.

Malfurion has the most hilarious underreaction to the news of the supposed death of the woman who had been at his side for ten thousand years:

Maiev tells him that he can still avenge Tyrande by defeating Illidan, the reason they came here in the first place. Kael, who had conveniently been out of earshot until now, arrives and briefs Malfurion on the mission: Illidan is using some kind of enchanted gem-like artifact — the Eye of Sargeras, that is — to perform a ritual among the ruins of Dalaran, and now it’s time to stop him.

The mission is on a timer: we have to defeat Illidan in thirty minutes before he finishes his ritual. Immediately, I take my entire starting force and send it northeast, where the naga are holding a human paladin captive. He’s level 8 and has Resurrection, which will come very handy in this mission.

(Incidentally, Tyrande’s inventory does appear on the ground, which means we won’t be controlling her again.)

As if apologizing for the original night elf campaign not letting us build chimaeras, here they’re actually the key to this mission. We need to kill four naga summoners, who can only be damaged by magic and hero attacks. Chimaeras happen to have the magic attack type, as do faerie dragons, a new unit we unlock in this mission.

Kael can handle the defense of his base against the Scourge base to the southeast, so I just attack Illidan. The small naga outpost to the south falls easily, and the paladin’s Resurrection helps me recover the losses.

The main naga base, however, puts up a much harder fight. It’s absolutely crawling with naga units and pumps out replacements at an absurd speed, while also being home to a level 10 Illidan and a naga sea witch. I had to reload my save at this point several times, trying different combinations of units and attacks, even using the Scroll of Animate Dead I had saved from the previous mission, even if necromancy isn’t really something night elves should be doing. From a certain point onward I built only chimaeras, and that proved to be a fortunate decision.

The ritual is interrupted, and Malfurion decides that enough is enough, and his brother should face execution this time.

But Illidan, at last, once his plan is ruined, reveals what the plan actually was.

Okay, I have two questions here.

One: why didn’t you just say so? If your plan was to destroy the Lich King, then you could have worked with the night elves towards this goal instead of antagonizing them. Arguably he was denied that option after Malfurion exiled him, but still, he did everything in his power to piss the night elves off, slaughtering whole villagers and burning down their ships while he could have just left quietly.

This part of Illidan’s characterization, at least, will stay consistent going forward.

Two: if Maiev was never your goal, why didn’t you use the Eye sooner?

Consider that he had assaulted Maiev’s base for a whole day or two before Tyrande and Malfurion arrived with reinforcements and he had to flee to Lordaeron. If he had simply used the Eye for his intended purpose right away, Maiev alone wouldn’t have been able to stop him, and he’d have completed the ritual and destroyed the Lich King — likely at the cost of tremendous damage to the world, but who cares if there’s a new Sundering if it means destroying the enemy of all life?

Whatever. Malfurion is still malfurious, as because of Illidan, Tyrande is dead. However, at this moment, Kael intercedes.

Maiev tries to defend herself, saying that she had to lie to Malfurion because otherwise he’d have immediately sought out Tyrande. Malfurion, however, now calls out Maiev, telling her “Just who is the betrayer now, woman?” Illidan assures him that, despite their differences, he would never lead Tyrande to harm, and offers his help in saving her.

Maiev protests, but Malfurion removes roots from Illidan and entangles her instead.

And this is the pivotal point here in this campaign.

As a teenager, I was mad at Malfurion. How dare he touch Maiev — she’s the main character (and also really cool)! But now I see that I was blinded by protagonist-centered morality. While she may have been the protagonist until now, empathically, Maiev is not a good person.

All the way through, she never displayed empathy for anyone. She jumped to conclusions that the furbolgs and wildkin were driven mad by Illidan, and executed them without mercy. She jumped to conclusions about the satyr working with Illidan. She regretted helping Drak’thul silence the ghosts haunting him. She didn’t grieve for Naisha — instead her demise only marked the point when Maiev’s quest became personal. She left Tyrande behind and lied to Malfurion about her fate — and then clung to the urgency of stopping Illidan, because it gave her an excuse for her inexcusable behavior.

She may not be evil, and she’s nominally on the side of good, but that doesn’t make her a moral person, either.

Roy Greenhilt put it in better words than I can:

And that’s precisely what, to me, makes Maiev such an interesting character. She’s actually morally grey, not moustache-twirlingly, World-Tree-burningly morally grey. And unfortunately, later media completely blundered this aspect of her, writing her either as an outright villain (in Wolfheart) or as just another night elf commander, interchangeable with the likes of Shandris and Jarod.

What a waste.

The Brothers Stormrage

And so Malfurion enlists Illidan’s help in saving Tyrande.

It sure is interesting that the moment Tyrande’s life is on the stake, Malfurion seems to completely forget about all legitimate grudges he had with Illidan — a list that could have been shorter if he hadn’t exiled his brother in the first place.

Meanwhile, Tyrande turns out to be doing… quite fine.

This is actually a naga mission disguised as a night elf one. Malfurion and Illidan’s forces have completely separate bases and resources. Neither brother is going to use flying units (for flimsy reasons), and so the plan is that Illidan and his naga will travel along the river and rescue Tyrande, while Malfurion will… er… um…

…hold his position?

Yes, to this date, I don’t understand the story reason for including Malfurion here.⁴ He’s entirely superfluous. Illidan does all the work while Malfurion has no goal besides defending his base. It could have been that the intent was that he defends Tyrande while waiting for Illidan to rescue her, but he cannot actually do that, because his ground-only forces have no access to Tyrande’s little outpost. Nor does Tyrande need to be defended, since she can’t actually die: a trigger automatically heals her whenever her HP drops below 30%.

As the finale of this campaign, this is a “final exam” kind of mission, though coupled with the additional complication of learning a new faction from scratch. There are five undead bases on this map, two for Malfurion and three for Illidan, and one of them is inaccessible.

That said, the parallel processing doesn’t have to be all that parallel, at least on normal difficulty. I started with Malfurion, since he’s attacked from two fronts. I built up an army, razed the one of his two opponents’ bases that is accessible by land (southeast of his position), then moved my trees there, to a more easily defensible position. All the while, Illidan wasn’t attacked even once, so I could build up his army ahead. Once Malfurion’s southern opponent was eliminated, the northern one focused on Tyrande instead, so I could largely forget about Malfurion and concentrate on Illidan.

By the time I switched to Illidan, his workers had gathered so much gold and lumber that I could simply build up an army to the limit and not worry about upkeep. And when I did, I appreciated just how overpowered the naga were.

We’re only required to destroy the red base to complete the mission, but I razed the two outlying bases first for a simple reason: there’s a spot on the map where the two brothers can meet and exchange items (likely not intended by the map designers). Since Malfurion won’t carry over to the next campaign, but (spoiler) Illidan will, I gave him all the best items.

With the red undead base destroyed, the mission is complete. Illidan opens a portal to let Tyrande escape.

They reunite back at Malfurion’s camp. As soon as Malfurion himself is in sight, Tyrande immediately forgets Illidan and goes to meet her beloved, who didn’t do jack squat to rescue her.

Malfurion says Illidan can’t be forgiven for all the suffering he’s caused⁵, but for saving Tyrande, he’ll let him go. Illidan, on his part, says that lordship over the world never interested him — only power, only the magic. However, by aiding the night elves, he has betrayed his new master (whoever that is), and now he should be careful.

Well. This seems to be the end. Everything is neatly resolved, and it’s time for farewells–

Ignoring everyone else, Maiev and her forces follow Illidan through the portal just before it closes. Tyrande tries to reason with Maiev, saying that Illidan has atoned for his crimes, but Malfurion says it’s no use. Maiev has become vengeance itself, bound forever to the hunt, and all he can hope for is that she doesn’t cause even more havoc than Illidan.

For now, the kaldorei are going home. As for what happened to Illidan and Maiev beyond that portal… we’ll find out soon enough.

Thoughts on the Campaign

Terror of the Tides is an awesome campaign — in fact, easily my favorite campaign in TFT, and one of my favorites in all of Warcraft 3.

It’s full of surprises and twists, characters making decisions that seem unexpected yet are entirely in alignment with their personalities and prior actions. The gameplay is varied, ranging from wilderness exploration to base sieges to dungeon crawls to escort missions. And story-wise, it shows that night elves, despite their reclusiveness, can be effective explorers when it comes to that, help others on their way through foreign lands, and make a meaningful difference.

Illidan and Maiev have more in common than either would admit. They’re both antiheroes committing evil for the supposed greater good, cautionary tales of those who fight monsters becoming monsters themselves. They truly deserve each other.

My only complaint is not about this campaign itself; it’s about World of Warcraft. What bothers me is that not even a trace of this expedition is left in WoW. It’s like the night elves never visited Silverpine Forest.⁶ It’s not shown or even mentioned there. There are no camp remains, no expedition members left behind, not even letters or small keepsakes. Their role in saving Kael and retaking Dalaran is never mentioned either. In fact, and I hope to get to that, Dalaran spent the entirety of vanilla and The Burning Crusade under an impenetrable dome, with nary a mention of what was going on there.

I do realize that WoW was developed in parallel with TFT, and TFT likely brought lore that the WoW developers had no time to incorporate. But this just underscores the point I intend to make later, when I get to WoW: I think including all of Kalimdor and all of the Eastern Kingdoms in the vanilla game was a mistake, and northern Eastern Kingdoms should have been their own expansion to give them the justice they deserved.

Next up: the so-called “Alliance” campaign. Racism is bad, mmkay?

Protect the caravan at all costs!

What ships, incidentally? Didn’t Illidan’s naga destroy most of them while targeting coastal towns? ↩
As opposed to a rogue/wizard, which would be a multiclass character. ↩
Though Pyrewood Village is in WoW, River Arevass is nowhere to be found. ↩
The gameplay reason is obvious: the map designers wanted you to control two bases at once. ↩
Illidan did, after all, massacre several villages’ worth of night elf civilians. Malfurion hasn’t forgotten that, so there’s no protagonist-centered morality at work. ↩
Oh no, I’m engaging in nelfposting in my own blog! ↩